A July 2026 report to the President by Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The AI priority
The report's fourth stated priority concerns the research enterprise's readiness: "we must prepare our research enterprise for the AI revolution. AI will accelerate and radically transform the way we do science."
Its diagnosis locates the constraint outside the models: "even the most capable AI models will be slowed down in the bottleneck of institutions and systems built for the last century. As we renew the infrastructure that powers American science, we must reengineer it for the AI age."
The second half of the argument concerns what AI does not remove: "even as AI compresses the time from question to answer, we will still need human hands to build the instrument or prototype. We must build that capacity, too, investing in advanced manufacturing, the skilled trades, and the vast pools of talent and tacit knowledge outside the traditional academic pipeline."
This is a physical-bottleneck argument of a recurring shape — capability gains in reasoning do not by themselves compress the experimental and manufacturing steps that follow — and it is notable for appearing in an administration document that is otherwise acceleration-framed.
The report's broader agenda includes mobilizing the federal enterprise "around national challenges," clearing "the ground for American builders," and reuniting "the work of discovery and manufacturing across the country."
Relationships
- related: AI for Science — the institutional-bottleneck argument against pure capability-driven acceleration
- related: Michael Kratsios, Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), America's AI Action Plan, Genesis Mission